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be observed even in certain aspects of the prose, not necessarily as a
result of influence, perhaps only because of the effect of an analogous
subject matter. "He planted passion-flowers in the shade, pansies in
the sun, covered hyacinths with manure, watered the lilies after they
had flowered, destroyed the rhododendrons by cutting them back, stim–
ulated the fuchsias with glue, and roasted the pomegranate tree by ex–
posing it to the kitchen fire"-the errors of this catalogue are com–
mitted not by the infant Gargantua but by pecuchet. Rabelais knew
nothing of encyclopedias but he too wrote "a sort of encyclopedia
made into farce." His intention was in part that of Flaubert-it was
the intention of burlesque, the mockery of learning. But only in part:
Rabelais also had the intention of which Flaubert's is the exact in–
version. It is no doubt all too easy to reduce Rabelais to a classroom
example of the high optimism of the early Renaissance, and to make
more naive than it really is his humanistic delight in the arts, sciences,
crafts, and exercises which are available to man. Yet the optimism and
the humanistic delight are certainly of the essence of Rabelais and they
.are specifically controverted in
Bouvard and Pecuchet.
We have but
to look at the respective treatments of gymnastics to see how Flaubert
stands Rabelais on his head-Gargantua's friend Gymnast can make
any demand upon his agility and strength, to Rabelais' great pleasure,
but nothing is sadder than the middle-aged Bouvard and Pecuchet
putting themselves to school to the regimen and apparatus of Amoras's
manual, which, absurd as it is, descends in a direct line from the
Renaissance idea of the Whole Man, the vaunting mind in the vault–
ing body.
If
we speak of encyclopedias, there is one actual encyclopedia
which we must have in recollection-the great
EncyclopMie
itself.
Flaubert never makes Diderot the object of his satire---one may well
suppose that the author of
RameauJs Nephew
was the last man in the
world with whom Flaubert would have sought a quarrel-but Did–
erot's great enterprise of the
EncyclopMie J
which derived its impulse
as much from the spirit of Rabelais as from the spirit of Bacon, is
the heroic and optimistic enterprise of which the researches of
Bou–
vard and Pecuchet
are the comic and pessimistic counterpart. To have
thought of Diderot busily running about France, taking notes on this
trade or that process, learning how spinning or weaving or smelting
or brewing was done, so that all the world might have a healthy
